Skip Navigation



Nucleic Acids Research Advance Access published online on October 5, 2008
Nucleic Acids Research, doi:10.1093/nar/gkn673
This Article
Right arrow Full Text Freely available
Right arrow Print PDF (75K) Freely available
Right arrow Screen PDF (84K) Freely available
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
37/suppl_1/D816    most recent
gkn673v2
gkn673v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Commercial Re-use Guidelines
for Open Access NAR Content
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Almeida, L. G.
Right arrow Articles by Vasconcelos, A. T. R.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Almeida, L. G.
Right arrow Articles by Vasconcelos, A. T. R.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© 2008 The Author(s) This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Database Issue

CTdatabase: a knowledge-base of high-throughput and curated data on cancer-testis antigens

Luiz Gonzaga Almeida1, Noboru J. Sakabe2, Alice R. deOliveira1, Maria Cristina Silva1, Alex S. Mundstein1, Leonard Cohen3, Yao-Tseng3, Ramon Chua3, Sita Gurung3, Sacha Gnjatic3, Achim A. Jungbluth3, Otávia L. Caballero3, Amos Bairoch4, Eva Kiesler3, Sarah L. White3, Andrew J. G. Simpson3, Lloyd J. Old3, Anamaria A. Camargo5 and Ana Tereza R. Vasconcelos1,*

1Laboratório Nacional de Computação Científica, Petrópolis, RJ, Brazil, 2Human Genetics Department, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, 3Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, New York, NY, USA, 4Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) and Structural Biology and Bioinformatics Department, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland and 5Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, São Paulo, SP, Brazil

*To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: +55 24 22336065; Fax: +55 24 33 6124; Email: atrv{at}lncc.br

Received August 14, 2008. Revised September 21, 2008. Accepted September 22, 2008.

The potency of the immune response has still to be harnessed effectively to combat human cancers. However, the discovery of T-cell targets in melanomas and other tumors has raised the possibility that cancer vaccines can be used to induce a therapeutically effective immune response against cancer. The targets, cancer-testis (CT) antigens, are immunogenic proteins preferentially expressed in normal gametogenic tissues and different histological types of tumors. Therapeutic cancer vaccines directed against CT antigens are currently in late-stage clinical trials testing whether they can delay or prevent recurrence of lung cancer and melanoma following surgical removal of primary tumors. CT antigens constitute a large, but ill-defined, family of proteins that exhibit a remarkably restricted expression. Currently, there is a considerable amount of information about these proteins, but the data are scattered through the literature and in several bioinformatic databases. The database presented here, CTdatabase (http://www.cta.lncc.br), unifies this knowledge to facilitate both the mining of the existing deluge of data, and the identification of proteins alleged to be CT antigens, but that do not have their characteristic restricted expression pattern. CTdatabase is more than a repository of CT antigen data, since all the available information was carefully curated and annotated with most data being specifically processed for CT antigens and stored locally. Starting from a compilation of known CT antigens, CTdatabase provides basic information including gene names and aliases, RefSeq accession numbers, genomic location, known splicing variants, gene duplications and additional family members. Gene expression at the mRNA level in normal and tumor tissues has been collated from publicly available data obtained by several different technologies. Manually curated data related to mRNA and protein expression, and antigen-specific immune responses in cancer patients are also available, together with links to PubMed for relevant CT antigen articles.

The authors wish it to be known that, in their opinion, the first two authors should be regarded as joint First Authors.


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?


This article has been cited by other articles:


Home page
 Nucleic Acids ResHome page
A. S. Syed, M. D'Antonio, and F. D. Ciccarelli
Network of Cancer Genes: a web resource to analyze duplicability, orthology and network properties of cancer genes
Nucleic Acids Res., November 11, 2009; (2009) gkp957v1.
[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]


Disclaimer: Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.